Polishing a Turd

Just got in from several hours spend making very little progress in painting/priming the front yard fence. Jeez louise, it takes a long time to paint a fence. But it looks a LOT better. It still doesn't look good, but as I say in the title of this post, the fence is in pretty rough shape. Here's a before and after:

Here's what else we did today:

• Went to LePeep for breakfast. Gah, it was delicious. I had pancakes with some sort of honey granola almond mixture on top of them, and I swooned. I love LePeep. Eric and I used to go there back in the early days of our courtship. 
  
• Went to Home Depot. Again. We went yesterday to pick up a palm sander, among other things. I got it home last night, plugged it in, used it for 3 minutes, and then it broke. So we took it back and got a better one (it worked great). And we also picked up a hose, ostensibly to give Yogi a bath (didn't happen... he still smells), some sawhorses, etc. etc. etc. This has got to stop. 
  
• Primed the master bath. That room has at least 12 corners that I can think of. I think we're going to paint it a nice cream color, but that will be next weekend. 
  
• Eric fixed the lock on the back fence. We hooked up a padlock up there initially, and then it rained and the lock jammed. SIGH. So Eric sprayed it up with WD40 and it came loose, but we got an outdoor lock with some coating on the metal instead. 
• Eric also changed out the lock on the basement door. The basement door is currently located at the bottom of a pit where there once were stairs. We've got to replace the stairs, and then get a cover for the doors. The big question is WHERE DID THE STAIRS GO???
• I sanded the front fence, and then painted roughly 25% of it. My arms are pleasantly achy. 
  

In the meantime, my Aunt Ro and cousin John stopped by, which was great! Ro got to see all the progress we've made, as she was one of the first to see the house before we bought it--I think she was a little impressed. Ro and I then sat out on the front porch and ate some Cheese Nips and pretended that I had a glass of wine to offer her. She said that our neighborhood reminded her of Beaver Cleaver's. :) 

We also spent some good q-time with the pups, who were very well-behaved with our guests today. Yogi is becoming such a good good dog, but he has some very strange habits. Not only will he not eat his food unless all conditions around him are perfect (he needs permission, Pixie can't be near him, the wind has to be blowing from the Southwest...), he never poops normally. I realize this is a little too much information, but it's so strange. He does a little dance and then backs up INTO something, usually a plant or a bush, but sometimes a lamp post. 

It was an absolutely fantastic day outside--don't think it got over 75. We spent most of it outside, and now we're beat. We put in the movie "Black Sheep" with Chris Farley and David Spade. LOVE it. The scene with the bat in the cabin... Priceless. 

A dog in the lap is worth two on the floor...

Pix is up here in the chair with me. She is beyond sleepy. We took the kids to the dog park up in Broadripple this morning, and they loved it. They met about 30  new doggie friends and ran their little hearts out. Yogi especially--we've never actually seen him run before. He can go fast, and he's quite impressive when he does it. Pixie... eh, she got slobbered on a lot. We brought a frisbee in hopes that she would embrace that part of her DNA that says she should be good at agility and fetching. But she's relatively graceless, and hasn't figured out the "bring it back" part of fetch yet. 

Went to Home Depot today and spent some time and money. In order to get our home insurance, we have to make some repairs. 

• Eric is about 3/4 finished with the back steps. Our kitchen door is about 3 feet up off the ground. However, the steps down from the back door are about 6 feet away from the door itself. Weird, no? We assume there must've been a deck attached to the house at some point, and they just didn't bother to take the steps away. Unfortunately, the steps are made of poured concrete, and are totally immovable. It's going to take a jackhammer to get rid of them, at the very least. 
  
• According to our insurance people, we have to have a railing on staircases with more than three steps. UGH! So we have to make a stairwell for the front, which isn't going to look good. We picked components that match our front as best as we could find. 
  
• We picked up a palm sander so we could get the crappy peely paint off the front fence, and then repaint it. I got about 3 minutes into the sanding this afternoon (which was perfect for dong anything outside), and then the sander quit. So, I guess we're making another trip up to Home Depot tomorrow. 
  
• I trimmed out the master bath with primer. That was all I could handle. I hate priming. 
  
• We picked a color for the living room, which I really like and I can't wait to get it up on the walls. It's called "Melted Butter" and is obvs a muted yellow. It'll look good. 

We also finally broke down and bought a television, though we don't have cable or an antenna so we can't watch actual television. It's a nice little 19 inch flat screen, and it has a DVD player built in, which is very cool. So we're sitting here watching Stripes (big toe!!!) and I'm feeling nostalgic, because believe it or not, no other movie reminds me of my childhood more than Stripes. 

Pix is running in her sleep right now. She helped me paint this evening--help consisted of sitting under the ladder and giving my legs little licks every once in a while. 

Leaving on Tuesday for 3 days/nights in San Diego for a SHEEO conference. Should be a great conference, and I'm very excited to go, though will be missing my little family something fierce.

Mosquito Food

They love me. Apparently, I have the best blood in town, because all the skeeters in our yard brought their friends tonight and they had an all you can eat buffet on my ankles. 

We made some progress on the House today, all in a quite passive way.

Our contractor FINALLY, after about 2 months of bugging, took away our old fridge, which was sitting in the dining room and was really the major deterrent from us ge

tting much work done in there (or at least that's what I like to tell myself... it couldn't possibly be the huge pile of naily trim sitting on the floor...). The picture to the right may look to the unsuspecting viewer like a trashed out room, but to us, it's a fresh start, free of nasty old refrigerators. Anyway, he also took away the old water heater and all the old gross cabinets. Hooray!

• I finally scrubbed down the upstairs hallway, which looks now slightly less crappy than it did.
  
• I moved our lovely porch furniture around outside, and swept the porch, stairs and sidewalk, so it looks just a little less derelict. I also washed the front windows and swept down the cobwebs. 
• Doing laundry as we speak. 
• I swiffered tonight for the first time in three days. Picked up enough hair to make a new dog. 
  

Tomorrow, we're finishing the back steps, putting up a railing on the front steps, and priming several rooms. 

Here's the status on a couple rooms I've been griping about. Kitchen has both appliances hooked up, which is fantastic. And some of my books are on the bookshelves in my office. Happy. 

Also, GOOD NEWS! Eric got a job! He's been looking for a little while, and the market out here isn't great for architects, but he found a super position out east of Indy doing stuff he's interested in, and I couldn't be happier. He starts in mid-August. Go Big Sweetie!

Speaking of sweeties, our doggies are being very good tonight. Yogi is laying in his favorite corner, but shot me the stink eye when I tried to take his picture and threatened to go upstairs to the bathroom (where he likes to sleep... he's a weird dog). Pixie is laying in the fireplace with Smitty the Gargoyle and our elephant. Here's a picture. Too cute. And our fireplace actually looks good in this picture. Trust me, it doesn't in real life. 

Not much to report

Eric and his cousin Matt are building a very small deck off the back door. We didn't intend for it to be a small deck, but a large deck right now is, shall we say, prohibitively priced. But we needed the steps for home insurance, so it's a small deck and it's looking okay. Dogs are totally freaked out by it.

Eric's back is hurting again. He just ate an entire pint of ice cream to make it feel better.

And I just got bit by another 6 mosquitoes. SIGH.

Idyllic Afternoon

As promised, here are some pictures of our afternoon at the park. 

Sleepless in Indiana...

And not in a romantic soul-mate, country-crossing, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan sort of way either.

I'm on no sleep. NO sleep! Like Jerry Seinfeld when he's sleeping in Kramer's apartment and the Kenny Roger's Chicken place neon sign is blinking in his window... Sigh.

Yes, Pixie is a real handful. She's currently sleeping right next to me, and has been since, ohhh, 7:30 this morning. Why she chooses to fall asleep at 7:30 a.m. and not at 11:30 at night is yet to be determined. But regardless, it is a real pain in my butt to be wakened no fewer than 10 times a night by:

• a thumping tail
• a panty mouth
• a crazed licking of the fingers of the hand you've let escape off the side of the bed
• toxic doggie farts
• whines that mean "I'm gonna pee NOW, so you'd better hurry up, mom!, though you know I'm still going to poop in the attic tomorrow morning after you let me out..."

Anyway, despite all these things, we do love our pups. Took them to the vet yesterday after we discovered that the Yogmeister couldn't go to the groomer without a rabies booster--apparently his last vaccination was in 2004. Pix also needed several boosters herself. Pixie is the picture of good health, and was a big hit at the vet's office. Yogi was also exclaimed and cooed over, but we discovered (DUH) that he has gingivitis. We got a finger toothbrush and some poultry flavored toothpaste for him, and he appears to like it. Poultry flavored breath, however, is only slightly less repulsive than normal Yogi breath.

After the vet, we took them over to Broadripple Park, which is beautiful and huge and full of gigantic native trees, where we walked and hung out in the shade, and I got bitten no fewer than 10 times by mosquitos. I have pictures of this idyllic afternoon, but it turns out that we don't have a spare camera cord to replace the one Pixie ate. Perhaps I will make a trip up to Target this afternoon.

In House news, I was a very busy girl yesterday. I finished priming and painting my bookshelves, which I will move upstairs to my office this afternoon. This will be great, as that room is currently home to all of my books, which are all in boxes. This makes me crazy. I know deep in my soul that the reason I'm feeling so out of sorts lately is not because my books are in boxes, or because all my kitchen stuff is still packed, or whatever. It's because we have SO much to do with this house, but don't have the time or resources to do it with right now. Yet, I've settled upon my books in boxes as a source of stress lately, so I'm excited to get them unpacked. I am loathe, however, to start putting furniture in that room. Our carpet is GROSS (though could probably be helped by a good steam cleaning, and I don't know why we haven't done that yet). Ah well.

Breaking news: I just killed two flies. It was spectacular. One was a normal-sized fly that I got in just one swipe. The other, however, must've been like the Queen fly of all time. HUGE. And buzzy. So I went over there and just started banging in its general vicinity with a rolled up magazine. And I got it, except I didn't kill it--I maimed it. Normally, I'm totally a humanitarian and I wish no pain or ill-will on any living creature. But this time, I was just a little happy to see the fly on the floor, spinning around all crazy-like, buzzing frantically. Several well-placed thumps with the magazine ended that fly's time on this planet. And I celebrated. Yes, I am Haley. Lord of the Flies.

Where was I??? Ah yes. Bookshelves are painted. I also painted the trim in the halfbath downstairs yesterday, and touched up the door, which appears to be new. This is what I don't understand about this house. There are new doors, fixtures (though they're all the cheap gold doorknobs etc that are the worst match EVER for the period of the house), new paint (though definitely a "baby poop" sort of color), and all of that. But if you look closely, you see that each of the new doors has a flaw, that the doors were painted AFTER the doorknobs were installed, that the paint jobs suck... I'm not a home improvement genius, okay, but I'd like to meet the former owners/renovators of this house and just kick them in the butt. This house is a total gem, but they were about a month away from totally wrecking it. I guess we can be thankful that the gods of foreclosure lowered the boom before they got too far along.

Today, I'm going to repaint the kitchen door (as soon as Eric shopvacs it), and we're going to prime the master bath, back stairwell, and a portion of the hallway. We're also going to start working on the stupid trim. Here's the story there: we have LOTS of trim. Everything that could be trimmed out in this house is, and most of it is awesome (except the chair rail that is currently functioning as a crown molding in our living room... and it's white). And each piece of trim was attached to the wall with roughly 150 nails per 3 feet section. Exaggeration, yes, but you get my point. We have to bang out each nail individually on about, no joke, 400 linear feet of trim.

I may also run up to Bed Bath and Beyond and finally get the curtains for the big window in the living room. We've got dark drapes up right now, which were great for hiding stuff while we were still living in Boston, but keep things rather cave-like in here. I put up some nice sheers in the foyer and door windows, and they look great. Will probably just get some matching ones in here, and that should lighten things up considerable. We also have a transom window, and I think we'll hang our "Matson" sign there, until we can find/afford a stained glass insert.

Pretty psyched about getting things painted in here. We're currently rocking a brownish shade in here, which doesn't look bad, but doesn't add any sort of ambiance. The only issue is that in the foyer, when we commit to a color, we have to REALLY commit, because the color is continuous all the way up the stairs (20+ foot high wall in the stairway) and into the upstairs hall. How we're going to paint that high, I have no idea... That sounds like an accident waiting to happen.

We also have to get the damn toilets installed in the second floor bathrooms! Eric has to take out a couple pieces of tile in the master bath in order to shore up the toilet, which was apparently not sealed to the ground. I'm not really wedded to that tile. In fact, I kind of hate it, but it's really too nice to just tear out. And we spent so much time cleaning it that we'll have to be careful with it. Crap.

Okay, this has become stream of consciousness, and I need another cup of coffee. Like, 12 cups of coffee...

Quick Update

No huge news by any other standard than "it makes a difference in Haley's life"...

-Stove is installed in the kitchen. Last night, we had our first hot, homecooked meal in three weeks. It was just a baked pasta dish, but it had meat, and cheese, and it was COOKED! It was more delicious than I could have dreamed.
-Pixie got her first bath. I tossed her in the Jacuzzi tub (no jets, though), and scrubbed her down with some nice puppy shampoo. She did NOT like it, though she didn't fight it either. She just stood there with her chin on the lip of the tub, looking like a drowned rat. And then she came downstairs all prancy and got into it with her brother, who has the patience of a saint, I tell you. She's feeling very proud of her good-smelling, silky-haired self.
-Made an appointment for Yogi at the groomer tomorrow. This will not be a regular thing. In efforts to cut back, I'm forgoing a haircut for myself. So this will be a one-time clean up for the Yogster, where I anticipate he will loose about 15 pounds worth of hair. He'll be much more comfortable, too. We're just waiting for his records to show up, because we need to prove he's had his shots. Keep your fingers crossed.

And that's it. Eric and I were commenting yesterday in the car (which is pretty much the only place we're alone anymore) that the doggies are quite consuming. We like it, but I suppose at some point we're going to have to shift the focus from them back to the whole point of our being here, which is that darn house. Tomorrow, after grooming appointment and dog park trip, I WILL prime and paint my bookshelves. I will!